


And What They Found There

by Ma_Kir



Category: Call of Cthulhu (Roleplaying Game), Critical Role (Web Series), Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Shadow of the Crystal Palace
Genre: Ashly Burch, Chaosium, Cthulhu Mythos, Episode: Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Crystal Palace, Gen, Phil LaMarr, Psychological Horror, Rupert Merriweather, Spoilers, Taliesin Jaffe - Freeform, liam o'brien - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 17:53:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20262124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ma_Kir/pseuds/Ma_Kir
Summary: Six people went into the British Museum to retrieve an artifact from the darkness, but three returned. The other three still remain, somewhere else, as reflections and shadows.





	And What They Found There

_Look down the wondrous structure,_  
_Where the chequer'd shadows play;_  
_See the scattered groups increasing,_  
_Wending up the dômed way. _  
\-- E. Leathes, _Fragments From the Crystal Palace_

It's like one of Mr. Dodgson's stories, but so much worse.

Ida Codswell continues running, hiding behind a corner with her lamp. How her light has lasted this long is beyond her understanding. The fuel should have run out a long time ago. Even the Elekiter ... even the light device design that Edison and other men stole from her when she worked at the Holborn Viaduct power station wouldn't have lasted this long, or in these conditions.

Everything is grey and cold in this place of winding stairs. Nothing is smooth, but scratched and faded like the old daguerreotypes left in a drawer after a child's funeral. Staircases wind up, and down, and lead to nowhere. Ida knows this. Sometimes, it feels like she has walked on all of those steps.

She had ripped away her small, grey petticoats a while ago while fleeing the shadows, and trying to keep up with the mirror people. Dr. Pocket's rambling about them remains in her head sometimes. There are even times she thinks she can almost see him, drawn and pale and tired ... and scared. Just like her.

She has seen a lot of them. Many of them stick to her, following her down the jagged paths, and sharp edges leading nowhere and to all the different levels of this place that decidedly hasn't been the British Museum for quite sometime. It's like becoming lost in some mad landscaper's dream, or eternally navigating through a non-Euclidean nightmare.

Ida feels the exhaustion in her very being, but she realizes that she hasn't been hungry or thirsty in quite some time. In fact, come to think of it, when she remembers she hasn't had any bodily functions here, not even the need for sleep. This is not the case for the shadows, whose backwards faces she sometimes sees in the light of her lamp. It drives them away, shrieking back into the dark corners of this purgatory. She doesn't know how long she will be able to hold them off.

The light in her hands that, by all rights, she shouldn't have even had for this long before the shadows had taken her deep into this place, was a deterrent to them ... consuming her, but just as it repelled them, it also let them know where she was. It is only a matter of time before they manage to surround her on all sides, and take her away from her lamp.

Even so, there are other people sometimes. Not just Dr. Pocket, if it is indeed him, but Mr. Waylon the coat check gentleman. And others in different period clothing. Sometimes, she even thinks she sees animals like ... Kevin, the rat with the cat ears at her side. Ida vaguely recalls the story of Diogenes shining a lamp in broad daylight, making a statement about attempting to find an honest man. Ida doesn't know about that, but her light keeps her safe.

It is fitting, she thinks to herself as she turns another corner with some other people of the mirror, she had spent so much of her life wanting to be noticed because of her work with electricity, having her ideas stolen from her, that when she is the only one she can see with true light in a place of darkness she wants to do nothing else but hide, or flee from the situation entire.

Nevertheless, Ida clenches her jaw. She doesn't know where she is, or what she is now, but whatever else she has become, she is the light-bringer here. If she can provide a temporary shield for her and fellows against the shadows, she would gladly do it: to embrace this cross to bear that was never sought nor earned. And this place, even with its crawling darkness, will have to do a lot more to her if it planned to extinguish her hard held radiance.

For however long it lasts.

*

Dr. Mason Pocket wanders the labyrinth.

He recalls the etymology of the word, in his drifting mind. The_ labrys_: the double-bitted ax found on the island where the city-state of Crete resided. According to various studies, the Minoan civilization performed many sacrifices there to their gods. And, of course, there is the monster of myth, the Minotaur, that roamed a maze of that named created by the greatest of ancient Achaean inventors Daedalus.

But Daedalus did not avail Mason's assorted group, nor his sense of reason and order in this situation. Invention only staved off the occultic tide for so long before human folly fell to its primordial weight of inevitability. In retrospect, he should have listened to Ms. O'Neil on that account. If anything, he can relate to the _labrys_ most of all now: given that he had shattered the mirror that contained one of his companions.

He had been so sure it would free Ms. Codswell, as she had been pointing at him, trying to speak mutely from the dark surface.

Sometimes, he thinks he sees her here in the winding corridors.

Mason still knows there is a difference between the shadow people, and the mirror people. The shadow people are turned around _wrong_. Their faces are warped and twisted. If they were human, they stopped being so long ago.

The mirror people had definitely been human. But they drift around, out of colour, out of space, lost ... Just like him.

Neither shadows nor reflections trouble Mason anymore. He has come to, essentially, accept them all. There is a balance in this. There are no shades of red, green, or black to trouble the former archivist anymore. He feels like a shade in some ancient Sumerian afterlife, his breathing a rustling of leaves, his respite cold muck, his essence empty, his sense of purpose drifting away ...

It should frighten him, but he wonders if this is what it is like to be one of his beloved antiquities, his relics, sitting on their shelves all catalogued and organized. He helped destroy a precious black mirror, an ancient artifact after all, wrapped in symbols of ... Aklo? Perhaps, in retrospect again, the American Enoch Bowen might have had a better notion from his own Egyptian archaeological find over five decades before, a thing left in darkness rather being contained in radiance. In the end, perhaps this place is the dream of a museum within an undying mind, where the struggles between good and evil, day and night, and light and dark do not matter anymore in these shades of grey.

For all he had given out his pamphlets to reveal the knowledge of the ancients to the world at large, like the tomb of the dread Nephren-Ka perhaps in the end it should have all belonged to a museum -- as did he -- all of them consigned into boxes, and mercifully forgotten.

*

_There was a crooked man_, he whispers to himself, _and he went a crooked mile._

Archie Orlick staggers down the stairs, his arms outstretched in front of him, searching, reaching, trying to keep the balance. Trying to keep going.

_He found a crooked sixpence,_ he croaks in an Irish brogue, _against a crooked stile._

Archie had lived most of his life, looking over his own shoulder. As Septimus Goodfellow, the celebrity spiritualist whose finery he wears even now with his cloak and clasp and chain around a neck that by all rights and purposes should have been severed cleanly on a museum floor, he owed the Order of the Golden Dawn a lot of money.

The blighter Merriweather had what he wanted. He has even more of what he wants now.

_He bought a crooked cat_, he sings, softly, _which caught a crooked mouse._

Bathsheba. He doesn't think about her much. David's wife. The woman a king killed a man for with dishonesty. A cat entered for similar reasons. It wouldn't be the first time Archie got into trouble over pussy. Over dishonesty.

An actor's bread. Mathers. Machen. His countryman Yeats. Crowley. Fakes and actors -- pretentious _wankers_ \-- the lot of them. As if they were any different than he. When Archie set out on his path through spiritualist circles, taking on the fop mask of Goodfellow, he claimed to channel the spirits of the dead and see their secrets for what they are. A channeler. A goddamned medium. It seems so far away now. So much clearer.

Blatavsky, another fraud. She talked about people who remembered the future, and walked towards the past. Like he is walking now. Just like now. How dare they judge him? These fucks. They don't know. They know what it's like living from one coin to another and not know if they were going to get their bread that day, and there are so many ignorant suckers, so many around him ...

_And ..._ Archie murmurs, sing-sing, _they all liv'd together in a little crooked house. _

Nah. Archie lived his whole life looking over his shoulder. Now, all he can do is look back. 

Lemurians. Yes. That's what Blatavsky called them. People with one eye at the back of their heads.

And now, all Archie can do is keep walking forward, his hands reaching, traveling down towards the different planes of this world, through its corners, and its facets, not knowing when his next opportunity, his next fellow traveler, his next mark, his next meal-ticket will come.

And Archie, who once called himself Septimus Goodfellow, his pale twisted mouth opening wide is very, very hungry.


End file.
